Professor Eric Nelson's remarks at the Faculty meeting of October 3

I would like us to reflect for just a moment on how we got here.  Two years ago, a University task force on sexual assault asserted that final clubs were responsible for a wave of sexual violence against women on our campus.  The administration responded to this report by announcing an unprecedented set of sanctions against undergraduates who join unrecognized social groups, including final clubs and sororities.  As the subsequent debate unfolded, it emerged that the task force’s claim about the link between final clubs and sexual violence was false, and that the data on which it had relied in making this claim had been misconstrued.  From that point on, we ceased to hear anything from the administration and its supporters about the problem of sexual assault—although it must be said that the task force’s assertion has not to date been retracted, nor has any apology been offered to the large numbers of Harvard students and alumni who were mistakenly (and very publicly) branded as sexual predators by the University. 

The rationale for the sanctions then shifted; the danger was no longer assault, but discrimination based on gender.  Single-gender social organizations were now said to be no less odious in principle than racially segregated ones—a remarkable finding from a College that admits hundreds of students each year from single-gender schools, maintains a host of single-gender sports teams, clubs, and performing groups, and divides students by gender in undergraduate housing.  Presumably we would not do these things if we regarded them as tantamount to Jim Crow.  Indeed, I wonder if it has been noticed that several of the fellowships from which the administration proposes to exclude members of single-sex clubs are themselves tenable at single-sex institutions. 

But before a proper debate could be had about this revised rationale, it shifted yet again—this time to the value of inclusion, full stop.  On this view, the final clubs and sororities were to be anathematized, not for admitting members of only one sex, but for choosing their members at all.  The question became whether it was so urgent to rescue some Harvard students from the discomfort of rejection that we ought to deny all of them the right to form any intimate associations of like-minded peers, even off-campus.  But this too is now old news.  The most recent justification for the proposed ban seems to be that we are worried about the integrity of the residential system at Harvard—the prospect of undergraduates fleeing the houses to live in a “Greek” world of fraternities and sororities.  This despite the fact that 99% of undergraduates voluntarily elect to live in the houses—and that, if we are truly worried about this issue, we remain perfectly free to require undergraduates to live on campus, whatever the fate of the Lewis motion. 

When the reasons offered for a given policy change as frequently as they have in this case, we should begin to wonder whether the policy in question has anything to do with reasons.  The bottom line here, as it seems to me, is that we just don’t like these clubs.  And some of them, at least, clearly merit our dislike.  But the first principle of a liberal arts education—and of the liberal society to which we are all rightly committed—is that disliking something is an insufficient reason to punish people for doing it.  Here, I think, we might profitably learn from our students, two-thirds of whom rejected the proposed sanctions in a referendum last year.

Lastly, I think we need to take seriously the broader national context in which this debate is unfolding.  It is news to no one in this room that we are currently facing a concerted effort by dangerous opponents to paint Harvard and our peer institutions as bastions of ideological groupthink, in which a frenzied and menacing political correctness has replaced common sense—and in which freedom of speech and association are routinely sacrificed upon the altar of diversity and inclusion.  I do not think this is who we are, but it strikes me that, over the last two years or so—on issue after issue—we have been doing our level best to make it easier for these opponents to caricature us.  This would perhaps be a price worth paying if we were right on the merits—but, as it happens, I believe we have not been.  We have been getting it wrong and looking foolish in the process.  My suggestion is that we ought to stop.  There are, alas, very real battles ahead of us, for which we will require the support of a united faculty, student body, and alumni community—to say nothing of our fellow citizens.  I don’t see why on earth we would further risk that support merely to destroy a bunch of tweedy Victorian relics.

That there are problems with undergraduate social life at Harvard, no one will deny.  But, as the committee report helpfully notes, these have primarily resulted from decisions that we ourselves have taken—and it is our responsibility to address them.  Let us turn to that important business.

I urge colleagues to support the motion.

Thank you.

My remarks introducing the motion on clubs

There was a good discussion in the FAS faculty meeting. The matter will be put to a vote on November 7. Here is what I said:

I move: Harvard College shall not discipline, penalize, or otherwise sanction students for joining, or affiliating with, any lawful organization, political party, or social, political, or other affinity group.

This is a simple motion. It says Harvard College can’t punish students for joining a club. It does NOT say that students who belong to clubs can’t be punished for bad things they do. It does NOT take away any tool that has been used in the past to discipline students for their behavior. It would, however, block several social club policies that have been proposed over the past year and a half.

I cannot find a single case prior to May 2016 when Harvard said it would punish a student for joining any organization -- a club or anything else. To the contrary, when Harvard barred ROTC from campus, we explicitly rejected the idea of punishing ROTC students for joining a discriminatory organization. And in the 1950s, when Senator McCarthy called on Harvard to fire one of us, Wendell Furry of the Physics Department, for being a member of the Communist Party, President Pusey refused on principle, in spite of enormous political pressure and his own anti-communist sentiments. Harvard today holds the moral high ground. We would give it up if we were to adopt any policy that would punish students for joining a club.

Some who are concerned about my motion have asked me, “but what if a student joins X”—and then name some particularly odious national organization. Well, we have survived a long time without any rules against joining hated organizations. This is not the time to institute such a rule in order to crush some off-campus sorority.

Students should not give up their rights peaceably to assemble off campus when they enroll here, any more than they give up their rights to read, write, and say what they wish. Indeed, by becoming students they do not give up their right to have private lives. All these freedoms are fundamental to our educational mission.

In a Faculty meeting last year, I teasingly referred to the possibility of an Index of Prohibited Organizations, like the Index of Prohibited Books of the medieval Church. Little did I expect that the Clark-Khurana Committee would publish exactly such an Index—in fact a list that was expanded beyond what had been proposed before the committee reviewed the policy. Let’s not go down the path of trying to maintain a list of the sort that even the Roman Church eventually realized was a bad idea.

If we can’t remember history, at least let’s look to the future. Suppose we publish a list of clubs and punish their members. What will we do when government officials again demand that we punish members of some allegedly un-American group? In the year of the Muslim ban, would anyone be surprised if the government tried to put us to the test? Would we say, “Oh no. At Harvard, we suspend civil liberties only for organizations that threaten our deepest values, like the Bee and the Owl, not the ones you think are bad for the nation.”

I am grateful for the hard work of the committees that have worked on this difficult task, but I must note how little is said in their reports about the social structures they seek to destroy. The caricature of off-campus clubs as bastions of privilege, full of the stock of the Puritans learning to discriminate against other people, is not based in fact, certainly not in any facts presented in the report. Indeed, the report contains almost no facts of any kind. It does not even mention that more women than men are members of affected clubs. There is no data showing how many incidents have been reported at which clubs. That data might have shown that most of the trouble is caused by only a handful of the clubs, including only a few of the men’s and coed clubs and none of the women’s clubs. That would suggest that a narrower remedy made more sense than the broader ones that are proposed.

Data may be hard to come by, but then how will the College know who is in these private organizations? The report doesn’t say. Will we encourage students to turn each other in?

It is not true that everything else has been tried to combat bad behavior at the problematic clubs. There is no right to unpeaceable assembly; we should call in the police when students break the law. And we should tell students which clubs are dangerous places, and why. When muggings occur in Cambridge, we don’t just say, “there is crime in Cambridge, so students must stay on campus.” We tell them where they shouldn’t go, explain why, and expect them to protect themselves. To the extent that Harvard’s legal liability is driving any of this, or indeed to the extent that we are worried about student safety, education would be more effective as well as more appropriate.

I urge you to read Jason Mitchell’s superb minority report. From the beginning this has been an attempt to kill the men’s final clubs without much concern for the collateral damage from making a much broader rule. Let’s be clear what problem we are trying to solve and then go straight after it. Strengthening the Houses does not require punishing students for hanging out off campus sometimes. Opening “networks of power” to women does not require destroying the networks they have created for themselves.

And there is no silver bullet in Professor Allen’s astonishingly sweeping motion either. To “establish policies that protect individual freedoms while upholding the educational mission of the College” is exactly what committees have been trying to do for a year; it is time for a statement of principle from the faculty, not a carte blanche handoff to the administration. As the Clark-Khurana committee notes, the Allen motion raises but does not answer the question of what to do if the clubs do not cooperate. Punishing their members is not the right answer.

I beg you, this is not a trivial matter. Students engaged in unlawful or violent behavior should pay a price for what they do. But nobody should be punished just for joining a club. Not us, and not our students. Thank you.

Added after the meeting. A medievalist points out that the Index was NOT, in fact, a medieval invention; it emerged in the sixteenth century. In other words, it was a reaction to the Enlightenment, not a piece of pre-Enlightenment church culture. I regret the error.

Motion update

For those who are just coming up to speed, Harvard Magazine published a good summary of the situation at the time I filed the new version of the motion about club memberships.
The Crimson reports, on authority of a member of the Faculty Council, that the motion will be discussed at the October meeting of the Faculty, but not voted until the November meeting. This may or may not be true; I can't confirm it, since these matters are decided by the Docket Committee, which has not communicated any such decision to me. (The December 2016 FAS meeting was adjourned without a vote in a rather odd way, so the signatories to the motion are watching these procedural decisions rather closely this time.)
The Crimson has another story of interest, about a Title IX complaint against the University in which the Final Clubs are featured prominently. This news tends to support the theory that what got the ball rolling toward the mess we are in was fear that Harvard might be legally liable for a tort that happened at a final club. That would explain, for example, the insistence that the final decision about the clubs is for the president to make rather than the Faculty, in spite of the unambiguous language of the Statutes (she would be acting as a fiduciary, would go the logic, notwithstanding the assignment to the Faculty of responsibility for the discipline of students). It would explain the early public involvement of the Senior Fellow, who traditionally has not weighed in on questions about student parties, and the "regular" discussions taking place about final clubs between the College administration and the Corporation.  It would also explain the otherwise peculiar decision, even in the recent harsh version of the proposals, that the ethnic fraternities and sororities would be left alone, in spite of being doubly "exclusionary," on the basis of both gender and ethnicity. As they draw from several local universities, Harvard may have calculated that the risk of liability was small for events that might happen at them.
Connecting these dots suggests how the ball may have gotten rolling, but it is not in meant to question the sincerity of those who support the sanctions for other reasons. Whether or not this speculation is correct, I would fully support Harvard taking strong action to limit its risks, and protect students' safety to boot. (Though if risk mitigation really got this started, I wish the Corporation had been equally risk-conscious back in 2008, when it lost billions from the endowment overnight.)
On the other hand, the Title IX origin would make a great deal of what has been said over the past year rather incomplete and beside the point, if not disingenuous, and the actual solution proposed both overbroad and not even sure to include the original target in its kill zone. (Is the champagne being chilled in anticipation of Harvard's glorious victory over the KKG sorority?) It would also be worrisome in suggesting that the Corporation's interpretation of University governance is that the president has limitless authority to make any kind of decision over matters in which the University can be said to have any risk.
One more news item. The President has some words about the motion in her opening of term greetings. I will leave it to readers to make up their own minds about her characterization of the matter under discussion. But I would note that it is fairly unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, for the president to speak so strongly in public against a motion to be debated and voted by the Faculty at a meeting over which she will preside.

The first Crimson story linked above describes a one-pager I shared with the Faculty Council; I include it below for your information.

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Harvard College shall not discipline, penalize, or otherwise sanction students for joining, or affiliating with, any lawful organization, political party, or social, political, or other affinity group.

Explanatory note. This motion is intended to give students who join or form legal clubs or similar organizations the same protections that existing policies afford to all other students.  It also secures their right of free association.  If the policy is adopted, students could not, simply because of membership in a legal club, social or political organization, be sanctioned by the Administrative Board or by the Honor Council, or deprived of any academic or extracurricular opportunity or honor for which they would otherwise be eligible.

This motion is a version of the motion submitted last year in response to the USGSO policy announced in May of 2016. When that policy was reconsidered, the motion was withdrawn. Now that the recommendations of the Clark-Khurana committee have proven to be even more expansive than the original proposal, it is time for the full Faculty to debate and decide the question of principle: should students ever be punished for joining private organizations?

To recap very briefly the main points raised in support of the motion last year:

• Students should be punished for their acts, not their memberships.
• The right of free association, like the right of free speech, should apply to students as it applies to all US citizens.
• Harvard has never in modern times blacklisted any organization by prohibiting membership.
• Harvard specifically prohibits even asking faculty candidates about club memberships.
• In the 1950s, Harvard famously stood behind the right of faculty to join publicly unpopular but legally constituted organizations.
• The Verba report on ROTC (written while ROTC banned gay students) stated the principle explicitly: To punish students for joining a discriminatory organization would be “a paternalistic policy inconsistent with Harvard’s general approach.” The Verba principle is in diametrical contrast to the view expressed last year that “of course we can discriminate against people who discriminate.”

The motion has been reworded to drop the term “discrimination,” which some found confusing or objectionable, and to use direct language instead. Further relevant discussion appears on the FAS Wiki.

In response to last year’s motion, some protested that bringing the McCarthy era into the conversation was alarmist, as the policy then proposed was narrowly targeted and could not possibly be a step down any slippery slope. The fact that the new proposal does indeed take several steps down that slope confirms that a broad statement of principle is needed.

It is urgent that the Faculty’s voice be heard corporately, not via hand-picked representatives. When the USGSO policy was announced in 2016, the president accepted it simultaneously. When the Implementation Committee report was issued last year, Dean Khurana accepted most of its recommendations simultaneously. There has been no indication that the Faculty will be asked to vote on the final policy. The president, the deans, and the Faculty itself need to know the Faculty’s view on the fundamental question asserted by this motion.

This motion has twenty-one signatories, including all twelve who signed last year’s version.

Harry Lewis, 12 September 2017